Matias Faldbakken

Simon Lee Gallery is proud to present a solo exhibition of new work by Matias Faldbakken, his third with the gallery. In the 8 years since his participation in the Venice Biennale in 2005, where he represented Norway in the Nordic Pavilion, Matias Faldbakken has become internationally recognized as one of the foremost artists of his generation in Europe. His practice holds in perpetual tension the forces of proposition and cancellation, vandalism and erasure, aesthetic generosity and conceptual restraint, the possibility of language and its abstraction into illegibility. A consistent characteristic of Faldbakken’s work is the poverty of his materials. Earlier series have used framed garbage bags and flattened cardboard boxes as the ground for abstract or minimal gestures. Most recently the marks on the surface of these works have moved from within the frame to the surface of the glass and the edges of the frame. Smudged and erased,...